Review of “Weirdo”
Review by Liam Siemens
Photo by Robbie T
How do you make a magic show for the twenty-first century? In the tenth century, it was about grifting small coin from a few unsuspecting traders. In the nineteenth century, Robert-Houdin formalized it, founding a magic theatre, and performing tricks that Louie Bonaparte would later contract for political ends. In the twentieth century, magic gained visibility and grew weirder: Harry Houdini would survive public burial, magicians would establish their own club (called The Magic Circle), Criss Angel would gothify it and take it to television. So what about now?
When I think of magicians, I think of fedoras, trench coats, and fifth grade. I think of Las Vegas, special effects, and unfortunate talent shows. Whatever was dark and unsettling about magic is overcast by the kind of bathetic self-seriousness of a Criss Angel Mindfreak, or a David Copperfield. And can’t we now, just, like, YouTube their mystical tricks? But maybe I was being unfair, so last Saturday, I went to see Robbie T’s “Weirdo”, at the Vancouver Fringe Festival, to see if my intuitions were off—to see what magic is really like in the twenty-first century.
When Robbie T was younger, he tells the audience at the start of his show, he was awkward. He had strange tea-shade glasses, short shorts, and tightly curled hair that looked like blonde lint poofing out in every direction. He had very little success with girls in elementary school, and then in high-school, and, with the kind of doomed logic of a kid, thought that by becoming a magician his problems might be solved. One day, he told his father he wanted to be a magician. His father looked back at him and said, “Son, you’re a fucking idiot.”
Despite fatherly reproof, he pressed on, and the show is proof of everything he’s learned since, including the worthiness of being weird. And, without giving away too much, “Weirdo” is weird: there are pictures of Robbie T’s grandfather “golden balls” with two spherical vegetables hanging below his crotch; there’s Robbie’s thirty-five-year-old stuffed elephant brought out into the fray and used as a kind of choosing stick for audience participation, there’s a recording of Leonard Cohen’s voice, jokes about pet names, and boxes within boxes within boxes within boxes. All that said, Robbie T is more performatively weird than actually strange—he sniffs gunpowder and fresh markers on stage, winking at the audience, and looks a bit like a slim greyhound-ish version of Ryan Gosling—but he does show pictures of his childhood, and they are proof that Robbie was, at one point, the weirdo.
By the second half of the show you’ll already have been dazzled by Robbie’s tricks that are at times uncomfortably suspenseful, and you’ll be eagerly tracking a number of tricks that are building across the full length of the show. But what keeps the show engaging, and modern, and intimate, is the DIY feel of the set, the good comedy, and the tight confessional storytelling. Robbie T takes what we know about modern magicians, stuffs it into a hat, and pulls out something better.
Liam Siemens is a Vancouver writer with an unfortunate love of bullet chess and small books. Online, you can find him in a few publications. Outside, you can find him over-bundled and in search of cheap food. Check back in two years to see if his writing about sad music, love, and living online have landed him a job as an adult, or if he’s still living in monkish barista-hood.